Strawman Made Steel by Brett Adams

hire you. I just want an
answer.”
    “A dickhead. There’s your answer,” I said.
“You get the question for free: What do you see every morning in the mirror.”
    He turned to look at the big lump on the
floor. Then he drew heavily on the cigarette. He squatted by the man’s head and
hung the cigarette over his face. He shut his eyes and moved its burning tip
around like he was playing pin-the-tail, until it stopped just above the man’s
left eyelid. It dropped―
    “Wait,” I said.
    The cigarette halted a quarter-inch above
skin, and the accountant’s eyes popped open, expectant.
    “Eutarch,” I said. “Middle brother murdered
the younger.”
    He seemed to ponder my answer, before
turning toward the giant’s slack face, saying, “Would have been a pity to
tarnish a beautiful face.” He seemed to mean it.
    When he returned to stand over me again, I
caught movement in the corner of my eye. The sole of the big guy’s boot edged
an inch across the floor.
    “Bend down,” I said to the accountant, “and
I’ll whisper how he did it.”
    He bent until I felt his breath in my ear.
    Fast as a spasm, I twitched my head
sideways and back―and delivered the most brutal head-butt my neck would give.
    Only it missed.
    The accountant’s head whipped upward and
out of the way.
    Momentum took me over. I crashed onto my
skull, and lay on the floor still shackled to the chair.
    Which is where I’d wanted to finish.
    The accountant was too quick, too smart to
have fallen for a head-butt. I’m familiar with his type. Always cool
calculation.
    If you wanted to upset the calculation, you
had to heat the machine.
    So that’s what I did. Lying on my side,
head ringing from the blow it took on the floorboards, I stretched forward,
opened my jaws, bared my teeth, and sunk them deep into his leg above the left
ankle.
    (It’s a strange sensation, to feel a man’s
blood run in your mouth―at least, it seemed strange later.)
    Nothing heats like outrage. The machine got
hot.
    He made a noise deep in his throat and
wrenched his leg free, nearly taking my incisors with him. He stumbled
backwards and fell over the big guy, landing flat on his back with his legs
angled over the body.
    And the big guy came to life.
    With his hands still manacled behind him,
he raised his legs into the air, twisted to change their angle, and brought
them down around the accountant’s torso, a huge pair of pincers. He shimmied
until he got his knees to meet beneath the accountant’s spine, locking his
arms.
    The room was still except for the giant’s
shoulders, which heaved with his breathing. His hands were flexed into fists
the size of pineapples, white with strain. I couldn’t see his face or the
accountant’s.
    My backside had just enough play over the
seat of the chair to let me get my feet where I could lever myself upright. I
stood and waddled to the desk, wearing the chair behind me like a Victorian
bustle. The desk drawers had handles of tubular metal thin enough to get my
teeth around. When I’d pulled the top drawer open all the way, I found the keys
sitting there slotted onto a ring. I ducked my head into the drawer, like I was
bobbing for apples in a barrel, and managed to snag them on the second go.
    I swung around to face the giant, mumbled
“keys” around a mouthful of metal, then dropped them into his hands, which
sprung open to receive them.
    I glanced at the accountant. He lay pinned,
and still as a spinal cord patient. I turned and sat the chair over his legs
and waited while the giant attempted to unlock my handcuffs. His hands were
surprisingly nimble. Two minutes and I heard a click, and the weight of one
cuff fell dead away. I stood and undid the other, then stooped to free the
giant.
    He said, “ Danke. ”
    Without pausing to rub his wrists, he
wrapped his hands around the accountant’s throat and began to throttle him.
    I watched as the accountant’s face colored.
It got to purple―the same purple as the welt on